


In The Mirror Stands Half A Man

by lonelywalker



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/M, Shapeshifter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-18
Updated: 2011-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-18 08:21:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She would understand him better if only he had scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Mirror Stands Half A Man

She would understand him better if only he had scars.

It’s an antiquated affectation in these days of faster-than-light travel, of medicine so advanced it can, on occasion at least, raise the dead. There’s no practical need to go without an eye, to limp, to suffer the minor inconveniences and cosmetic imperfections of a crooked nose, missing fingers, or teeth loosened by too many barroom brawls. She welcomes the innovation. She really does. From childish concerns about illness to very real fears of living out the rest of her life maimed or disfigured, she’s learned to appreciate the modern miracles of medical science. But she misses the little things. She misses the scars.

He’s too smooth around the edges. She can’t help but think of him as soft, although she knows all too well how wrong a perception that would be. He has the unmarked skin of a child, of a civilian in a cushy job who has done nothing but live well in peacetime. She reacts to that. She always has, even though she _knows_ appearances are deceptive. She’s seen burn victims restored to apparent youthful perfection before her eyes, amputees graced with bionic limbs, blind men given new eyes. Appearances are worth nothing, but she still wants them – wants to see him hurt, wants to see a torn lip heal just a little ragged, a phaser burn blister and scar so that she can feel the graze of it against her fingertips in the dark.

She’d feel better if he weren’t so perfect, because the Prophets know she’s everything but.

“What are you doing?” she asks, as if she doesn’t care, moving her body as if she does. His fingertips on her back are so light that they tickle. It’s not that his touch is uncomfortable, but the way she can feel him _staring_ is keeping her from the report she’s supposed to be reading.

There’s a pause that says he’s formulating a reply. “Investigating,” he tells her. His voice, though quiet, still has that gruff edge to it, the one she suspects he devised years ago to give the impression of humorlessness, of invulnerability. It’s reassuring, in a way – the voice of a man who will never slip through her fingers like water through smoke.

She’s lying on the bed that still, somehow, remains _hers_ rather than _theirs_ , even now, with the sheets still crinkled and damp from their lovemaking. They're bundled high around her thighs, the room warm enough for a Bajoran summer. And she likes it when he distracts her. It staves off boredom, stops her from thinking too long or too deeply when she's supposed to be relaxing. “What are you investigating?”

“A strange and exotic landscape.” His mouth is near her, his breath tickling the scattering of hairs along her tailbone seconds before his lips touch the very small of her back. Her muscles tense up involuntarily, her back arching away from the kiss until she forces herself to submit to the touch, to enjoy it. It’s not difficult, she tells herself. Not hard at all.

Romance always seems to be a stretch, an unnatural action in a relationship that had for so long been nothing more than platonic. When they do try, it’s as though they’re both undercover, playing parts for hidden surveillance devices, digging for information. Talking about work is somehow simpler, even if they’re naked together, even if he’s inside her. She’s easy when she’s professional. She’s relaxed, confident reeling off protocols, complaining about lax security procedures. He can get at her that way, get her smiling like old friends do, sharing old stories, wearing away at older jokes and grievances. He can slide a finger over her clit and rub, and she’ll open up for him. She’ll make love to him motivated by a primal, physical need. But romance makes her uncomfortable, uneasy. She’s a knot of tension, prepared for violence.

“You have a security briefing,” she tells him, her voice clipped as though she’s delivering an order to a subordinate, as though neither of them is naked, as though this isn’t lovemaking at all. There might be a note of humor in her tone. She might be smiling.

It’s so hard to read him, to comprehend his silences, and part of her wants to feel him tense and recoil. But he’s flexible to even the most sudden pressure, and impossible to break. “I have a security briefing,” he repeats, and perhaps there’s faint mockery in those words. His fingers work their way up her spine, hot and curiously soft against her skin. Before they had been together the first time, she had imagined… What had she imagined? Had she imagined at all?

“There have been discrepancies in the cargo manifests of various civilian vessels recently.” There’s a scrape of something – teeth? fingernails? – moving down to the very tip of her spine, making her shiver, making her long to glance over her shoulder and resolve the mystery. “I have two deputies working with Chief O’Brien to determine whether the discrepancies are a result of faulty scanning mechanisms in the cargo bays.”

She should reply with a curt, “Very good, Constable.” There are times, when he’s like this, that she feels that a salute would be most appropriate. But… they _can’t_ be teeth, can they? Not while he’s so busily and professionally giving her a report. Still, he’s the one person she’s ever slept with who could quite easily sprout an extra set of vocal cords simply to make a point.

Instead, she pushes her PADD to one side, and thumps her head down on the pillow as she stretches out her back. “You’re wasting your time. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you know it’s not the scanners that are misleading us.”

“Mm.” Now it’s the tickle of hair across her shoulder blades. She had imagined… had thought he must be like putty, like melted wax – amusing, intellectually interesting, but far from erotic. Yet she’d seen him take on the form of animals before, creating apparently perfect replicas of mammals with fur so real to the touch she’d had to wonder about the rigidity of his hairstyle in a humanoid form. And she’s wondered about his choice to appear as a flawed facsimile of a human male. Why not Bajoran? Why not Cardassian, particularly during the occupation? Why not a woman, if his natural strength and speed would remain the same regardless of his form?

She rolls over with her eyes tightly closed against the glare of the ceiling lights, and then there’s a mouth - _definitely_ a mouth – on her right nipple, teasing, sucking like a demanding child. She curls an arm over her eyes, and bucks her body up against him, searching for greater contact, knowing that he can avoid her effortlessly.

“O’Brien looks after those sensors like they’re his children. There’s no way there could be any faulty calibration. If there were, we’d have noticed it long before now. Eighty percent of what we _do_ is reliant on cargo…” She’s almost proud of how level her voice sounds, of how she’s thinking this through logically, poking holes in _his_ arguments, for once.

He doesn’t respond in any way she can hear. He could look monstrous, now. She suspects that some people think he always does. He is never among his own kind, among men and women who look like him, who are attracted to him through innate biological impulses rather than the sort of intellectual desire she’s had for him, cultivated and nurtured instead of springing fully formed into being.

They’ve each changed so much in so little time, thrown together into friendship, into romance. Everything is elastic. She, too, has felt her body change in recent years, from the minor cosmetic surgery that had helped her to pass as a Cardassian, to her sudden status as a pregnant woman. Not a mother, never a mother, but she’d felt her body loosen and stretch as she imagines he must now, had felt joints flow with languid ease, her balance and movement different by degrees. The changes had been temporary, and never under her control. Still, this is what she thinks of when she thinks of him – change as growth, as something natural despite it all.

She opens an eye, blinks, stares out from under the shadow of her elbow. Something is wrong, not in the way he’s touching her, but there’s _something_ scratching at the edges of her mind. She can’t see him, not quite, but she can see movement, can feel him warm low on her belly, the weight of him resting against her right thigh. He’s moving a finger (a toe? a tongue?) through the hair that curls at her crotch as if studying it, his patience as endless as his fascination with her. And the faint annoyance becomes realization.

“You know it’s not the scanners.” This time, it’s not a question.

There are so many things about him that make him seem older – the crack of his voice, his constant professionalism, the withering stares and weary sighs he seems to have perfected over the years. But there are moments when he seems so young, when she remembers that he grew up sheltered in a laboratory, that perhaps she’s the elder in the relationship. Now, from one word, she knows he’s grinning like an impossibly pleased schoolboy. “No.”

“Then why…?”

She can almost feel the smile on his lips as the heat of his breath seems to leave droplets of moisture on her clit. He’s between her legs without needing to push them apart, perfectly comfortable molding himself to her. And yes, yes. _That_ , whatever it is, certainly fits every definition of a tongue she’s ever cared to know, gloriously rough as it slides along her slit, making her forget every question she’s ever had.

 _Why not a woman?_ Dax, with her irrepressible interest in the plasticity of sexuality and identity, had been endlessly delighted with the sheer possibility of it all. After all, Dax had said, what's love but friendship coupled with sexual attraction? She’d loved Odo as a friend, as a fellow soldier, for years. And he was the one person for whom physicality didn’t matter at all. He could take a female form, a Bajoran form, even _her_ form, were she interested in an imperfect mirror image of herself. The options would be endless. _Are_ endless.

With every other lover, regardless of race or species, she had had a reasonable idea of what to expect. She’d seen more than enough naked men in the Resistance to wipe out any sort of prudery. And everyone on the station had their own opinions about what advantages a shapeshifter might bring to the bedroom. He could be as big as she liked, could fill her up, as full as she had been when she was pregnant, soothing that lingering emptiness inside her. Child and lover and father, but he hasn’t been that at all. He’s never been anyone but himself.

She reluctantly swallows her pride to satisfy her curiosity. “If it’s not the scanners, what _are_ you doing?” she asks, breathing deeply, taking in the heat of his mouth on her as surely as she does the warmth of the air. Gradually, all of the spikes of tension in her body are leveling out, relaxed by his tongue, their conversation. Her mind is on cargo protocols – just the distraction she needs to let herself move gently against the attentions of his mouth, to let him… To just _let_ him, tendrils delving inside her, thickening, putting just the right amount of pressure on nerve endings, and then…

She tears her arm away from her eyes, reaches back to grip the headboard with both hands, certain that she’ll leave fingerprints in the metal if he continues like this. “You’re not… not looking for faults,” she says, forcing the words out. It’s the thinking more than the speaking that’s a struggle now. This feeling, this desire is so completely primal that she wants it, needs it so that she’s left utterly exposed despite her instincts to defend, always defend. “You’re making things better.”

She could swear that she hears a muttered, muted _yes_ in the seconds before she comes, when everything seems finally irrelevant and secondary to the sheer _everything_ of him. She could swear that she feels him larger than himself, surrounding her, covering her, filling her so that he’s the taste in her mouth, the pleasure between her legs, the blood in her veins. He’s impossible, and wonderful, and more than enough for her.

They keep the lights on, afterwards, as she lies half on him, blindly tracing his lips with her thumb, searching out imperfections and finding none. He tells her about scanning modifications, about suspected smugglers, about ways to ensure that contraband never enters the station on his watch. He tells her in measured tones and logical words that the temporary deception is necessary, that it gives merchants a sense of goodwill, that it blindsides the criminals. She loves its simplicity, his brilliance. He knows exactly how to calm her down.

He’ll be gone, soon, to a late meeting, to write reports in the quiet of his office in the few hours the Promenade isn’t buzzing with activity. And, when he sleeps, it’ll be in a bucket rather than with his arms around her. A _bucket_. Well, she smiles most of the time.

“You have to go,” she reminds him, as late as she can without feeling guilty, and he kisses the pad of her thumb, then her mouth, far too quickly for her to respond.

She opens her eyes at the hiss of the door opening, sees him walk out, his uniform perfect as always, every hair in place. Perfect. So perfect that it’s almost a flaw.

“Odo?”

She throws back the sheets.


End file.
